Poverty in Argentina hits 20-year high at 57.4%, study says | Hacker News Reader

Poverty in Argentina hits 20-year high at 57.4%, study says

reuters.com

53 pointspaulpauper42 comments

Argentina is definitely a case study on the importance of governance on the lives of everyday citizens. With its fertile lands and diverse landscapes with plenty of mineral resources (including crude oil), there's no reason for it to be as impoverished as it is, other than mismanagement of the economy.

Hopefully we're about to see that all turn around.

You don't get to change a country's culture just like that.

I assume GP is referring to Javier Milei who wishes to assert top down culture change in the government. Though given he's equivocating now that he actually has to execute on his lofty reform agenda of the (near) abolition of government, it seems unlikely it's going to play out as he's imagined/portrayed. If he does succeed in the execution, it will be an interesting experiment in anarcho-capitalism, and the whole world is watching and waiting to make it an example either against or for the ideology

Anarcho-capitalism is the "it played out differently in my head" of political theories.

That sounds more like marxism

Marxism is the "we're almost there, just keep trying" of political theories.

To the bottom

Seems more possible than before. El Salvador has done a pretty substantial about face on safety.

Honestly, a lot of us South Americans look at El Salvador and Bukele with a mix of hope, envy, and respect.

Is that the general feeling in South America or just where you're at? In the US, depending on who you ask he's the next Pinochet, general ignorance here of South American history notwithstanding.

I think El Salvador has a very well run media-and-public relations department that creates media and guidelines for publications in different markets (countries). It relies on social media, instead of relying on traditional public broadcasting like German's Deutsche Welle, British BBC or U.S Voice of America.

This has given El Salvador lots of "soft-power". What I've seen is that it will talk about (well researched) the target audience's pain points and show how El Salvador solves them.

Not sure I follow. You're saying El Salvador has an extensive and apparently successful propaganda apparatus that uses social media instead of state-controlled broadcasting. And thus the perspective of El Salvador held by those who do not live there is wrong? Not clear what you're suggesting.

> And thus the perspective of El Salvador held by those who do not live there is wrong?

Sometimes wrong, sometimes contradictory and most of the times a very sugarcoated version of reality.

Okay, so what is actually happening in El Salvador?

General feeling of a somewhat wide sample of my social circle, that encompasses various South American countries, Europe, and the US.

Same goes for the Salvadoreans I know.

Overall I feel it's only a combination of foreign NGOs + a domestic progressive minority that criticize Bukele.

Seeing as they voted Milei in, it was already changed.

This is where years of bad governance gets you.

Not to mention, the previous government kind of set some time bombs before passing the government over to Milei.

https://www.ambito.com/opiniones/las-bombas-que-le-dejan-jav...

Or maybe from the CIA overthrowing your elected leader in favor of a military dictatorship? I feel like that'd leave scars on any country 50 years deep.

What's the causal relationship between that military dictatorship in the 70s and mismanagement and overspending today?

What does scar mean here?

Downvoted for asking to dig deeper into the metaphor: scar.

Except the decline of Argentina started with the 1930 coup, which the US had nothing to do with. Then there were four other coups the US wasn’t involved in.

Yes, but all sides were roughly equal in power until the US came in and provided support to the far right faction, leading to 30000-50000 deaths from state sponsored terrorism, known as the dirty wars.

Of course Kissinger was involved, he always seemed to be, saying "If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly." Maybe you'd think that's all it was, tacit approval. But the final set of US military documents were finally declassified in 2020, showing the alliance between the far right dictators in the southern cone was brought together by the USA to murder their political enemies (Plan Condor). This was part of US's foreign policy of stopping communism no matter the cost. But in the process they completely threw the balance of power out of wack, and destroyed an entire generation of students, professors, and political opponents.

It's sad that we know all of this now, no government is denying it. But for some reason there's still a huge group of people who refuse to believe the fucked up things the US did during its Banana Republic years. You could throw a dart as south America and find a fucked up thing the US did.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/world/americas/argentina-...

https://unredacted.com/2019/04/12/u-s-completes-historic-tra...

I agree with your premise that the US did substantial harm in LATAM including Argentina. I reject the notion that the issues and history in Argentina are so simple that we can pin its poverty rate on the CIA. Can you at least substantiate how the Peron government leads to the poverty rates that currently exist in Argentina?

I feel like I covered that pretty well with the links I added? Argentina definitely stumbled in the early twentieth century, but were still in a decent position due to large immigration from Europe and early century gains to be a powerhouse economically. Then Peron took over, and over the next few decades he, and the puppets he put in power did many awful things, you really have to read about it if you haven't. He saw the middle class as politically dangerous and tried to surpress them; for example he fired thousands of university professors from every major university in the country. It was in the years following the Argentinian economy actually began to tank.

After Peron was finally expelled, there was an attempt to stop the hemorrhaging he caused, but sadly Peron was able to come back after a coup. Finally he died in the early the 70s and his wife took over, continue his legacy (for example she signed an order to kill leftists).

So it should be obvious at this point that Peron fucked everything up royally, and took a good economy and wrecked it. Then the US gets involved.

Operation Condor in part helped execute the overthrow of the wife, which would have been a good thing; except they replaced her with someone worse. After the coup, the courts were shut down, Congress disbanded, political parties barred. This was when the systematic state sponsored terrorism began in earnest, and the final nail in Argentina economically.

So at this point you either are convinced, or not; but I'm tired of doing your research for you. If you disagree, please include the relevant context to back it up, at least.

So pray tell, how is it that Chile, which suffered the same sort of counterproductive and ultimately idiotic CIA meddling, ended up being a prosperous Latina American country after the decades passed? Argentina and a number of other states in the region suffered certain consequences of US intervention, sure, but it's idiotically simplistic to blame their complex multi-decade economic woes on this alone, while ignoring these same decades of leftist populism, corruption in general and government mismanagement and all its consequences.

If anything, the boogeyman of the CIA/military industrial complex has been a persistently convenient, singular scapegoat of ideologically charged arguments for such failures for far too long, and it's ridiculous that some people who should know better with more modern evidence continue to take it so seriously.

Chile's a very weird country, economically speaking - I don't think it's a good point of comparison.

I sort of sympathize with your thinking, but at the same time, the problem with foreign intervention, even the subtle kind, is it distorts a nation's political structure by creating client elites that have part of their power base outside of the nation. These client elites then have a power base that waxes and wanes according to the current disposition of the foreign power, so you tend to get very chaotic politics, even if the investment of the foreign power is somewhat small. You have to remember it's not just spooks - it's also an entire ecosystem of people trained in US universities, working for US companies, or even, benefiting from a US-oriented Argentina.

It's a fairly natural consequence of the US being such a big economy, and it's obviously going to create very unpredictable externalities for neighbors (drugs in Mexico, raw materials in Canada, etc).

Argentina is an economic powerhouse of the region. A very rich country, with an enormity of poverty. Poverty in Argentina has run in cycles. Current events are really quite current and you can't pin them solely on events from the 70's. An easy place to start research would be https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_econ%C3%B3mica_y_sanita...

The current events are just the latest series of issues brought on by the Peron government of the 50s.

The crisis really started in the 50s, when Frondizi attempted "shock therapy" of the Argentinian economy. The government accepted massive loans from the IMF in a standby agreement that stipulated large changes to the country's domestic policies.

These IMF required changes were not politically popular and finally led to the resurgence in Peronism in the 70s (taken advantage of by Operation Condor). Between the 50s and 80s, Argentina would be unable to pay previous administration's debts, leading to further IMF loans with terms unacceptable to the populous, which then gave way to strikes and economic instability. The instability exacerbated the balance of payments problems of the economy, rinse, repeat.

Of course at least one administration tried to stop taking the IMF's "help," but due to the massive debt taken on by Frondizi, and the IMFs control of other international investment; trying to back away from the IMF after getting in bed with them would have destroyed the Argentinian economy just the same.

In the 80s this cycle gave way to neo-liberalism. Basically Menem (another Peronist) started allowing multinational corporations to snatch up the limited natural resources of Argentina. The deregulation of industry and international trade helped the economy in the short term; but didn't provide a long term revenue stream for the country (you can only sell natural resources once).

The 2000s were a brief respite to this economic crisis started decades before, driven by the IMF's unprecedented offer to restructure Argentina's debt and offer 70% discounts on their bonds. But sadly Argentina still has billions in foreign debt it owes, and so recovery would be slow. This led to multiple single term presidents in the 2010s. Finally leading to another Peronist being elected in 2019 (from the Justicialist Party, the largest faction within the Peronists) right before covid.

So, no the economic conditions of Argentina today aren't recent. The wiki page you linked even points out that the 2018 crisis started because of an inability to pay old debts, the problem didn't just start then.

It makes sense they'd elect a "minarchist" after having been failed repeatedly by their government (which was controlled by the IMF and US's respective foreign policies). Sadly I don't think Milei's shock therapy will work and better than Frondizi's, but time will tell.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentina_and_the_Internatio...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/762284

https://oxfordbusinessgroup.com/reports/argentina/2018-repor...

> Yes, but all sides were roughly equal in power until the US came in and provided support to the far right faction, leading to 30000-50000 deaths from state sponsored terrorism, known as the dirty wars.

But that’s not what caused the shitty economy. From 1930 to 1976, Argentina’s GDP per capita dropped from 75% of the US to under 50% of the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_Argentina.

The US did some fucked up things in Latin America, but as the Argentina example shows, in part it was because Latin America was already fucked up.

At least economically, there’s been plenty of countries that have ended up better off as a result of repressive right wing governments. Chile’s GDP per capita growth matched that of the US from 1980-1990 under Pinochet, and significantly outpaced the rest of Latin America: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/GDP-per-capita-1980-2003...

Are you suggesting that the US no longer does fucked up things? Because I'm sure very little has changed on that front

Definitely not. I do think most of the terrible foreign policy America does today in South America is done relatively openly through the IMF and WTO though. Who knows, maybe in 40 years there'll be another document dump that shows the crazy things we're doing today though.

They could never find more than 8000 people. The 30k number was made up so they could get more funding from non profits across the ocean. It was admitted by the guy that came up with the number, and confirmed by other people who were in the meetings at the time. 8000 compared to what the Jewish had gone through a few years before was not enough to call it a genocide.

Compared to the 2-3k homicide per year caused by crime that can’t be controlled because “armed forces = bad” / ”police=dictatorship”, not that representative and I get why they would come up with that number.

Just because they couldn't find their bodies doesn't mean they weren't killed. The Argentinian military in 1978 even estimates the number disappeared at 22000. I obviously believe the number is higher. If you're going to make these claims, at least back them up.

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB185/full%20%5BRep...

You think that in 50+ years if there were 22000 people missing the families of those would not have come out to say “hey my X is missing”?

https://www.abc.es/internacional/abci-fernandez-meijide-cifr...

https://www.lanacion.com.ar/politica/la-dura-confesion-de-un...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JIabDqQsnjk

There's an anti-Brexit/UK-doomster commenter on the FT who regularly points out that at the start of the 20th century Argentina was in the top 10 for GDP per capita but it was all destroyed by mismanagement, incompetence and corruption

[dupe]

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39448542

And more related:

What is going on in Argentina?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39452866

I hope Argentinians prefer being extremely poor pro western instead of being moderately poor BRICs cuz that's what happen when you bet on dying horse

America in 10 years

When you say something like this, can you please elaborate a tad little more with some big picture points. Curious query from someone not from/in America (the USA). Does this include Canada too?

It's non-sense.

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